Shake-ing it up Good Night Desdemona delights BY BILL RODRIGUEZ
	Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) By Ann-Marie MacDonald. Directed by Peter Sampieri. With Julia Barrett, Richard Porcelli, Kerry McCormack, Daniel Janeiro, Elizabeth Larsen-Silva, and Conor Tansey. At Providence College’s Blackfriars Theatre through February 15.

The fantasy lives of Democratic politicians have been pretty antic as acted out in recent months. But that’s nothing next to the frantic dream life in Ann-Marie MacDonald’s comical Good Night Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet).

A busy little team at Providence College’s Blackfriars Theatre is putting the comedy through its paces in fine style, under the direction of Trinity Rep’s Peter Sampieri.

The play takes place in the imagination of an English literature scholar, the missing commas of address in the title notwithstanding. Constance Leadbelly (Julia Barrett) has been a grad student for 10 years, working on her Ph.D. She toils in the word mills of academe under her mentor and heartthrob, Prof. Claude Night (Richard Porcelli). Not literally, only literarily — she pens critical essays that the busy man doesn’t have the time, or mental agility, to write. He announces brightly one day that he has just been made full professor and will leave the university and toddle off to London to marry a rival to Constance. He is taking a minor post at Oxford that she’d hoped to get. As Charlie Brown would say: "Arrrrrrgh!"

Indeed, the rest of the play is even more cartoonish a fantasy, as Constance plunges into a world populated by animated action and broadly funny characters. The thesis she has been working on involves her peculiar theory that Shakespeare must have plagiarized Othello and Romeo and Juliet from a couple of comedies. The plays just don’t make sense as tragedies, she figures, since there is no Aristotelian inevitability to the crises, just easily avoidable blunders.

Constance finds herself as a character in both plays, trying to understand the men and women there, just as she needs to figure out her own life identity and relationship to men. She ends up affecting the women in the plays, as they teach her about herself. Playwright MacDonald has great fun having Constance discover that she is speaking in iambic pentameter, but not as much fun as she has improving on Shakespeare’s plots — usually, of course, to unexpected effects.

After all, after Constance blurts to Tybalt that he and Romeo are cousins, there are hugs all around instead of two immediate deaths in duels and Romeo’s banishment. Juliet was only 13 and Romeo’s affections were notoriously fickle, so if the lovers’ fates were not star-crossed, given one more day they might find each other, well, boring. And since we’re in the world of Shakespeare and its odd prevalence of mistaken identity, what if the short-haired Constance were mistaken by Romeo for a boy, and Romeo were bisexual?

Yes, and what if someone like Constance came to Othello and busted Iago about that strawberry-decorated handkerchief? Desdemona, with her penchant for war stories and violence, might be the one to fly into a jealous rage of misunderstanding. (After Desdemona storms off, sword in hand, Constance remarks to us: "Boy, Shakespeare really watered her down, huh?")

This is all great fun, as each of the actors imaginatively cavorts through their characters. Barrett, as the center around which all the others spin, has the job of holding the play together, which she accomplishes with fine comic style as well as energy. Barrett gives good exasperation. Crucially, Porcelli keeps up with her. He nicely fine-tunes funny in different ways, as the dastardly professor (simpering, smug), Iago (sneaky), and Romeo (frat brat, spoiled).

Their support doesn’t let them down. Kerry McCormack rages about wonderfully as a lusty Desdemona, and settles down in contrast as Juliet’s nurse. (I don’t know where the Southern belle accent was coming from, but it almost fit.) Juliet is more slyly lascivious than we’ve ever seen her, as Elizabeth Larsen-Silva puts a mischievous glint in her eye. As both Othello and Tybalt, Daniel Janeiro establishes a baseline of irritability that he plays interestingly against occasional flashes of good humor. And playing mop-up in assorted incidental roles and as a one-man chorus, Conor Tansey is an absolute hoot — his random pop song impersonations alone make us eager for him to step out again.

Director Sampieri has recruited Trinity colleague Michael McGarty to design a simple set with plenty of under-the-surface reminders, beginning with several trap doors. He brought in Craig Handel as fight choreographer, which shows in the polish and complexity of those scenes.

Good Night Desdemona and its director have pulled the best out of all involved, setting a high standard for future productions at Providence College. It’s one to not miss.